University of Virginia Library

Victory Gardening and Food Conservation

Vegetables were grown in Charlottesville and Albemarle during
the years 1942–1945 on a scale never before remotely approached.
The County Board of Agriculture launched the Victory Garden campaign
in the first months of 1942. Community and neighborhood
leaders and Home Demonstration Clubs promoted the Live at Home
program among 2,367 rural families, a large majority of the total
number of farm families in the county. Mrs. Bessie Dunn Miller
and her staff gave personal instruction to 249 families in 1943, teaching
them how to produce sufficient food to meet all the demands of
home consumption. Spurred on by the slogans “Food Fights For
Freedom” and “You Can Shorten the War with Food,” ninety-six
per cent of the rural population was raising its home food supply
in 1944.

Quite active in this movement were the 4-H Club boys and girls.
In the course of 1942 they cultivated 321 acres of land. An average
of thirty girls took part in the Sears Roebuck gardening contests
every year of the war. Some $700 worth of food was consumed
in the homes of these thirty girls in 1943 alone. Louise Morris of
Free Union, first prize winner in 1944, produced enough food to
feed her family and can 504 quarts. Edith Sullivan, also of Free
Union, winner in 1945, produced enough food to can 940 quarts.
Though the boys were engaged for the greater part of their time in
livestock raising projects, as many as seventy-three of them completed
gardening projects in 1943. Maxine Lamb, president of the
Albemarle County 4-H Club Council in 1944, won a $25 war bond
and entered the 4-H Club National Victory Achievement Contest
for her contribution in food production during 1943. On the 379-acre
farm of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Lamb of Route 2,
Charlottesville, she planted her own Victory Garden, which consisted
of 150 tomato plants, 200 sweet potato plants, twenty-four
pepper plants, twenty-four eggplants, twenty celery plants, plus corn
and string beans. She assisted her father with the planting and
working of 3,000 tomato plants, 1,500 cabbage plants, and 1,000
sweet potato plants. She fed and cared for 500 baby chickens, raised
pigs of her own, helped her oldest brother with the feeding of fourteen
calves until they were old enough to graze, and assisted the hired
hands in milking 118 cows. She picked twenty gallons of blackberries,
prepared thirty-five quarts of them for her pantry shelves
and assisted with the canning of ninety-five other quarts, and helped
to put up 183 quarts of string beans, fifteen quarts of carrots, twenty-five
quarts of squash, and thirty quarts of butter beans. She served
ninety meals and planned 150 other menus for her family, remodeled

five of her old dresses, helped clean and wash the family clothes
weekly, collected old phonograph records, tin cans, scrap metals, and
rubber, and helped to sell war stamps through her school and club.
Three members of the Albemarle 4-H Clubs, selected for outstanding
club work in the county, appeared on the coast-to-coast broadcast
of the United States Department of Agriculture's National Farm
and Home Hour in the spring of 1944 and told how they were carrying
on Jefferson's traditions in agriculture. The trio included
Maxine Lamb, Dan Maupin of White Hall, and Anne Carpenter
White of Scottsville. Their subject was, “Four-H Builds on Foundations
Laid by Jefferson.” Two Albemarle County girls were declared
4-H Club canning champions for Virginia, Bessie Preddy in
1943 and Maxine Lamb in 1944. Members of the Negro 4-H Clubs
made a profit of $1,471 from vegetables raised by seventy-three boys
in 1942; in the course of the last war year, ninety-nine Negro boys
completed 120 gardening projects which netted a profit of $2,100.[41]

Under the direction of the Charlottesville and Albemarle County
Civilian Defense Council, Coordinator Seth Burnley formed a Victory
Garden Committee for the city of Charlottesville on March 10,
1942. Louis Chauvenet was chairman; Mrs. Theodore Hough and
Mrs. Leroy Snow served as committee members. Among the first
steps taken in the Charlottesville campaign were successful efforts
made by Mrs. Dudley C. Smith to procure for amateur gardeners who
aspired to green thumbs vacant lots and available plows, each of
which, of course, had suddenly been exalted to the lofty status of
being at a premium. Mrs. Snow encouraged gardeners by supplying
plants in return for a share in their produce. Thus were many
city gardeners provided with land, tools, and plants. Mrs. Hough,
an accomplished horticulturist, provided what amounted to an education
for the inexperienced urban vegetable growers. Chairman
Chauvenet and Mrs. Hough visited in person every city garden once
each week throughout the summer of 1942. Twice a week she broadcast
advice on gardening from radio station WCHV. Every Monday
afternoon she held a forum at the Court House. Occasionally
she addressed the civic clubs in the city and the Parent-Teacher Association.
In March, 1943, she began to write a column which was
published in The Daily Progress. Through this medium she dispensed
pertinent suggestions about how to grow vegetables and how
to avoid unproductively torturing one's aching back, for backaches
had become the most common ailment all over town. Victory Gardening
fever, a symptom which preceded sore knees and spinal columns
which could be straightened up only with pain, was quite contagious.
One insight into the amazing rapidity with which it infected all
areas of the city is afforded by the fact that Charlottesville had a
quota of 2,800 vegetable gardens in 1944 and by the impression of

Victory Gardening leaders, who never found time to take an actual
census of plots cultivated, that the quota was definitely exceeded.

Meantime, various other groups in the city promoted the Victory
Garden campaign. Among these was a Children's Victory Garden
Club, the first of its kind in the state, organized in the spring of
1942 and co-sponsored by the City Recreation Department and the
Rivanna Garden Club, the latter of which furnished land, tools,
seeds, and prizes. Miss Nan Crow and Mrs. Delos Kidder planned
and personally directed gardens near Moore's Creek on the Monticello
Road. Boys and girls tilled twenty garden plots there, raising
vegetables for their families and for the Children's Home. They
gained a valuable experience in the rudiments of gardening and
learned surprising things. One of them expected to find his ripened
radishes tied in bunches and waving on a bush!

Boy Scouts, white and Negro, undertook and completed garden
projects. Troop 1 at the University Baptist Church cultivated some
seven acres of land on Route 29. The boys of the downtown Troop
1, sponsored by the Charlottesville Presbyterian Church, worked
as many as twenty-two gardens of their own. Troop 5, sponsored
by the Church of the Holy Comforter, cultivated a large garden in
the Fry's Spring area. Negro Scouts' garden projects were carried
out on the farm of their leader, Dr. J. A. Jackson.[42]

The city's first Victory Garden Fair was held at the Old Armory
in the autumn of 1943. Vegetable and flower growers who had
proudly entered 300 or more specimens of their handiwork inspected
the exhibits of vegetables, fruits, canned goods, and flowers with
the green eyes of jealousy whenever they spotted the carefully selected
and spotlessly clean products of a rival who might provide stiff competition
for whatever prize they coveted. Miss R. Belle Burke, district
Home Demonstration agent for Northern Virginia, and Miss Ina
Glick, who served as judges, had no easy task choosing the most nearly
perfect example of each variety, but their decisions were accepted with
general good humor. H. M. Brumback demonstrated easy ways of
storing foods and root crops for winter use, and Mrs. Huff explained
how to preserve foods by dehydration. Again the next year the Albemarle
Garden Club, Rivanna Garden Club, and the National
Women's Farm and Garden Club held a Victory Garden and Flower
Show, to which the First Methodist Church played host. At the
same time the Albemarle Garden Club and the City Recreation Department
sponsored a similar contest in Washington Park, and more
than 200 exhibits of superb produce were displayed by Negro
gardeners.[43]

If home grown foods were to render maximum service in the
war effort, a large percentage of the total production of Victory
Gardens had to be preserved for consumption after the harvest season,
when fresh local produce was unavailable. Aside from other

obvious virtues, such preservation could appreciably alleviate demand
for the rationed output of commercial canneries and pressures upon
the nation's overburdened transportation system. Much emphasis
was, therefore, placed upon persuading and teaching gardeners to
lay aside for the rainy day of the unproductive winter season a
properly preserved part of their summertime plenty. Local Home
Demonstration agents and Club leaders instructed in the most modern
techniques and equipment for home canning, though some of
their pupils couldn't for years find a pressure cooker for sale at
any price. The less familiar but, in the instances of some foods,
not less useful methods of food conservation, such as drying, brining,
and storing, were also taught and demonstrated. The clubs'
members set a good example by canning 56,107 quarts of various
foods in 1942. The following year, spurred on by their tireless
leaders, 129 farm women had become expert canners and put up
45,420 quarts of fruit and vegetables and stored an additional 9,265
bushels. During the year 1944 rural families canned 56,958 quarts
of fruit, meats, and vegetables; brined 7,719 gallons; dried 2,468
pounds; cured 8,975 pounds; stored 3,860 bushels; and froze 9,978
pounds. In the last war year 52,776 quarts of fruits were canned;
2,108 pounds dried; 18,540 pounds cured; 38,144 bushels stored;
and 31,783 pounds frozen. Girls of the 4-H Clubs put up 28,106
cans of food in 1943, an average of 51 cans apiece. In 1944 thirty-five
of their more diligent members put up 5,271 quarts, an average
of about 153 tins or jars per capita. On a somewhat smaller scale
in 1945 a total of 10,068 quarts were preserved, maintaining approximately
the per capital level of fifty per girl which had been
established in 1943.

When the local rationing board ruled that a person could not buy
home canned foods without the surrender of ration coupons, the
County War Board passed a resolution in support of some means
whereby people could sell their canned home products without having
to ask rationing points.[44]

Plans for a canning center in Charlottesville were formulated in
April of 1943 by the Kiwanis Club and the Central Virginia Planning
Commission. It was located in the basement of the New
Armory. The Nehi Bottling Company loaned two large pressure
cookers. Mrs. John A. Smart served as expert supervisor during the
month of June, and Mrs. Fay Barrow took charge during July. A
charge of five cents per can or jar covered inspection of the fruit and
vegetables grown by city and county women and the right to use
the pressure cookers. In a month's time eighty-three women had
conserved 5,558 cans of food. Mrs. R. L. Allen alone canned 500
quarts of vegetables and meat, the largest amount put up there by
one person. The final record for the first year, 1943, was impressive:
within seven months 28,000 jars of home-produced foods had

been processed. Expenses had been shared by the City School Board
and the City Council, but their burdens had been made light by the
$500 which had been donated by the Kiwanis Club. In the same
year Negro women had put up 1,081 cans of foods at their canning
center in the Jefferson School under the supervision of Miss Laura
J. Wyatt and Mrs. Evangeline Jones.

The canning center in the Armory had been run at capacity in
1943 processing vegetables, but no fruit had been handled. A
drought in June and July, 1944, however, seriously curtailed the
vegetable crop. Thus the good providers who frequented the center
were enabled to turn to the preserving of fruit, a happy circumstance
in view of the bumper peach crop of that summer. Approximately
150 women there preserved 3,000 jars of peaches and an unrecorded
number of jars of apples. Coupons for canning sugar were issued
in enormous quantities even before the harvest season began. County
women received authorizations to buy 364,116 pounds of sugar, and
city canners were issued coupons for 281,460 pounds. By V-J Day
55,000 cans of food had been processed in the canning center for consumption
at home and abroad.

The Scottsville canning center was opened on July 14, 1944, in a
cinder block building on the edge of the school grounds which had
been erected by the county government and equipped through expenditures
of Federal funds. Thomas A. Allison, Agriculture teacher
at the Scottsville High School, was from the first the chief promoter
of the project, but he was able to enlist the support of the Lions Club
of Scottsville. Mrs. Inez Moore of Warren, who was in charge of
the canning center, was assisted by Rufus Rush.

During the first season a charge of three cents each was made to
canners for pint tin cans obtained at the center; the charge for quart
cans was four cents. After the first summer and autumn the costs
of fuel used in the center had to be met by the local community, and
tin became more expensive, so these prices for cans were raised to four
and six cents, respectively.

During 1944 the thrifth housewives of the community prepared
19,854 cans of food at the center. On the busiest day of that year
585 cans were processed. In this period 160 white and 64 Negro
families used the canning center. Later years brought increases in
these figures. Albemarle County canners from as far away as Crozet
converged upon Scottsville, and the center served also many people
from neighboring Buckingham and Fluvanna counties. In 1947 a
total of 43,930 cans of food were processed in Scottsville by 369
white families and 90 Negro families.

When requests from Charlottesville and Albemarle men in the
armed forces began to come for chicken, nuts, steak, pork, and fruit
cake, the women at the center prepared Christmas packages for mailing

before October 15, 1944, in order that local servicemen who
were overseas might benefit from home-grown foods and revel in
nostalgic feasts especially prepared for them by loved ones at home.
Still remembered with particular poignancy is the avid interest and
devotion with which the wives and fiancees of some physicians of
the 8th Evacuation Hospital could talk of hardly anything else for
weeks but what they were canning amid summer heat at the center
for their long-absent husbands' and sweethearts' Christmas dinners
and how many packages they had already taken to the post
office.

The United Nations Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Administration
asked for a Food Bank in 1945. Mrs. Ruth Burruss Huff
called together the heads of all city and county organizations which
could give effectual cooperation in gathering and processing food
for foreign relief. Choice fruits and vegetables from Victory Gardens
all over Charlottesville and Albemarle County were donated by
Father and Mother, Son and Daughter. Generous quantities of
prized home-grown produce were transported to the canning centers
in Charlottesville and Scottsville. Home Demonstration Club women,
4-H Club girls, Red Cross Canteen workers, and other city and county
women did the canning. With lumber donated by the Barnes Lumber
Company, members of the Young Men's Business Club, of which
Harry A. Wright was president, did the packing and crating. A total
of 3,000 cans of food was sent to destitute peoples in conquered countries,
a gift representing the concerted efforts of the residents of this
community.[45]

Under the direction of the Civilian Defense Office, a local nutrition
committee was organized in 1942. At its first meeting a representative
from the Farm Security Administration explained the Share-the-Meat
program. Home Demonstration women and 4-H Club
girls in both county and city studied the nutritive value of foods,
how to plan balanced meals, and home methods of baking bread and
making cheese.

The alarming condition of some children in rural schools who,
it was found, often stayed the full school day with no nourishment
was improved when seventeen Home Demonstration Clubs cooperated
in serving lunches to these children. In two communities 4-H
Club girls canned food for the school lunches. By 1945 nutrition
problems had diminished, but they still persisted in six of the county
schools. Doctors who examined 1,363 school children in Albemarle
County in the fall of 1945 found that 1,161 were not in
perfect physical condition.

When registration for War Ration Book Number 2 began in
1943, Home Demonstration leaders provided information at the
registration centers as to the intelligent use of ration points in meal

planning and marketing. Typical of rural dietary and economic
trends which food rationing had caused or stimulated were these
three facts: by the end of the war many families were making their
own syrup and raising bees for honey to counteract the sugar shortage;
others were making cheese in quantities sufficient for the family
food supply; still others were raising and canning more tomatoes to
replace citrus fruits.[46]